NYT Connections gives you 16 words and asks you to sort them into four groups of four. The groups are color-coded by difficulty: Yellow is easiest, followed by Green, Blue, and Purple. You win under the New York Times’ official statistical definition when you finish with fewer than four mistakes—that is, with zero, one, two, or three incorrect guesses.
The puzzle releases at midnight in your local time zone. A streak requires consecutive wins completed before your local midnight, while archive games do not change your current or maximum streak. You can play without registering, although signing in is recommended if you want progress and statistics to follow you across devices.
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What is NYT Connections?
Connections is a daily word-classification puzzle. Its board contains 16 words; your task is to identify four sets of four words that share a category. A category might involve meanings, phrases, names, abbreviations, or another relationship. The intended solution always contains exactly four groups of four.
The New York Times says each puzzle has exactly one solution and is deliberately tricky because words can appear to fit more than one category. That design is the central challenge: a word may plausibly belong to several themes until the other words reveal which interpretation the puzzle setter intended.
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How the color levels work
| Color | Relative difficulty |
|---|---|
| Yellow | Easiest |
| Green | More difficult than Yellow |
| Blue | More difficult than Green |
| Purple | Trickiest |
The colors describe the puzzle’s intended category difficulty, not the order in which you must solve the groups. You may submit any four words at a time, and finding a difficult category first is allowed.
How many mistakes can you make in NYT Connections?
The official win-rate threshold is fewer than four mistakes. In practical terms, a puzzle counts as a win if you solve it after zero, one, two, or three incorrect submissions. The New York Times’ statistics display a mistake histogram from zero through four mistakes.
This threshold describes how wins are counted in the official statistics. It does not establish every detail of the game-over screen or imply that all players see the same wording after a fourth mistake. If you are tracking your performance, distinguish a perfect solve (no mistakes) from any solve that remains below the four-mistake threshold.
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Why mistakes are easy to make
- Overlapping categories: several words may fit a broad theme, while only one narrower interpretation is intended.
- Decoy groupings: the board is constructed to make plausible but incorrect sets look attractive.
- Polysemy: a single word can have multiple meanings, names, or grammatical uses.
- Premature commitment: locking in a category before checking all 16 words can consume a mistake on a group that is only locally convincing.
A safer approach is to mark a possible group mentally, then test whether the remaining 12 words produce three clean groups. Because there is one intended solution, a proposed category that leaves awkward leftovers is usually a warning to reconsider.
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What time does NYT Connections reset?
The new daily puzzle releases at midnight in the player’s time zone. Your local date, rather than a single worldwide clock time, determines when the next puzzle becomes available.
How the daily streak works
A current streak counts consecutive daily wins completed before your local midnight. If you finish a puzzle after midnight, that completion breaks the streak even if you began playing on the previous calendar day. The Help Center states that a broken Connections streak cannot be reset.
- Open the puzzle for the current local day.
- Complete it before your local midnight if you want the result to count toward an uninterrupted streak.
- Return after the next midnight for the following daily puzzle.
Because the cutoff is local, travelers and people who change time zones should use the time displayed by their device and account as the practical reference.
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No. Archive puzzles do not change your current streak or your maximum streak. They are separate from the consecutive daily sequence.
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The archive reaches back to June 12, 2023 and is available to All Access and Games subscribers. Solving an archived puzzle can still update several account statistics:
- Completed-puzzle count
- Win rate
- Perfect-puzzle count
- Mistake-distribution statistics
That separation lets you practice older boards without repairing or damaging the streak associated with the current daily run.
Where can you play Connections, and do you need an account?
The official help information describes Connections as free to play across its listed platforms:
- The NYT Games app
- The NYT Connections webpage
- nytimes.com/theathletic
- The NYT News app
You do not have to register or sign in to play. Signing in is recommended when you want progress, statistics, and other account-linked information retained across devices. The official article does not provide a country-by-country availability table, so availability should not be assumed to be identical in every region.
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Does Connections have hints?
There are two distinct help routes documented around the game, and they serve different purposes: Connections Companion is a community discussion space, while Connections Bot is a subscriber analysis feature.
Connections Companion: community hints and discussion
Connections Companion is a community forum where anyone can read hints, comments, and difficulty scores. It can help when you are stuck, but comments may contain spoilers. If you want a nudge without seeing the answer, solve as much as possible first and scroll carefully; community posts can reveal categories or complete solutions sooner than intended.
| Help route | What it provides | Main risk or requirement |
|---|---|---|
| Connections Companion | Community hints, comments, and difficulty scores | Open to readers; comments may contain spoilers |
| Connections Bot | Personalized performance and puzzle analysis | Available to All Access, Home Delivery, and Games subscribers |
Connections Bot: analysis rather than a documented answer key
Connections Bot is available to All Access, Home Delivery, and Games subscribers. It reports puzzle-difficulty comparisons, a skill score, a solution-uniqueness rating, category difficulty and order, common mistakes with AI-generated descriptions, and guess-by-guess analysis.
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Those features are designed to explain how you played. The documented feature description does not establish Connections Bot as an unrestricted answer-reveal or guaranteed hint generator, so treat it as a performance-analysis tool rather than assuming it will provide a specific clue on demand.
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What does “one away” mean?
“One away” is a term used in a 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics study describing an experimental hint condition. That research terminology should not be treated as proof that the current live NYT game always offers a “one away” hint. The official help documentation identifies Connections Companion as a source of community hints but does not publish a complete, permanent inventory of in-game hint messages.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How difficult is Connections?
Difficulty depends on the categories, the ambiguity of the words, and your familiarity with the subject matter. The color order gives a relative guide inside each puzzle, but it is not a numerical score and does not predict how many mistakes an individual player will make.
A 2025 ACL paper evaluated 100 puzzles from a dataset covering daily games between June 12, 2023, and June 3, 2024. In that controlled setup, human participants achieved 56% accuracy without hints and 60.67% with the study’s full-hints condition. These figures describe that particular participant design and experimental configuration; they are not a population-wide NYT solve rate and do not guarantee that hints improve every player’s result.
A practical solving method
- Scan for exact relationships. Look first for words that form a familiar phrase, a clearly shared type, or an unmistakable named set.
- List competing meanings. For words that could fit multiple themes, note the different interpretations instead of assigning them immediately.
- Test four-word candidates. Ask whether all four words share the same level of specificity. A broad connection that includes one strained word is weaker than a narrower, consistent category.
- Check the leftovers. Remove a proposed group mentally and inspect the remaining 12 words. A valid group should make the remaining categories cleaner, not more confused.
- Spend guesses deliberately. Submit only when the four-word set has a coherent explanation and you have considered the strongest alternative.
- Use help strategically. If you consult Companion, decide whether you want a category-level nudge or are willing to risk spoilers. Use Bot afterward when your goal is performance analysis.
How to protect a streak while using the archive or hints
- Play the current daily board before midnight in your local time zone.
- Use archived puzzles for practice without expecting them to alter current or maximum streaks.
- Open community hints only after deciding how much spoiler exposure you accept.
- Sign in if you switch devices and want your account-linked progress and statistics retained.
- Remember that a broken streak cannot be reset according to the Help Center.
What the official statistics do—and do not—tell you
Your statistics can show how many puzzles you completed, your win rate, perfect-puzzle results, and how mistakes are distributed, including the zero-through-four histogram described by the official help information. Archive solves feed those performance measures, but not the current or maximum streak counters.
The Help Center does not publish a population-level solve percentage in this FAQ. The only quoted accuracy figures here come from the separate 2025 ACL evaluation, whose 100-puzzle sample and participant setup limit how broadly the numbers can be applied.
Bottom line for common Connections questions
- Mistakes: fewer than four mistakes is the official win threshold.
- Reset time: a new puzzle arrives at midnight in your time zone.
- Streaks: consecutive wins must be completed before local midnight; broken streaks cannot be reset.
- Archive: available back to June 12, 2023 for All Access and Games subscribers; it changes performance statistics but not current or maximum streaks.
- Hints: Connections Companion offers community material with spoiler risk; Connections Bot offers subscriber-only analysis of your play.
- Rules: sort 16 words into four groups of four, with exactly one intended solution and deliberately overlapping possibilities.
Sources and scope
The rules, access details, timing, streak behavior, archive, Companion, and Bot descriptions come from the New York Times Help Center’s Connections article, accessed October 13, 2026. The accuracy percentages come from the 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics paper “NYT-Connections: A Deceptively Simple Text Classification Task that Stumps System-1 Thinkers.” The official material does not establish a country-by-country availability matrix or a general population solve rate.
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